People & Teams

Articles

In this article, a developer shares his personal experience with the transition from a waterfall environment to an agile one. He compares what it was like for him coding, learning, and communicating using each methodology, and he shares what it was like making the change to agile—and why he's never looking back.

A good key indicator for measuring how well your agile team is performing is the burndown chart. It’s a simple concept—as time passes, the amount of work to do decreases. Of course, there will be days when progress is not as expected or tasks end up larger than originally estimated. A burndown can help your team reset and keep stakeholders in the loop.

This article details a team’s experience in implementing pair programming as a way to get work done as part of its agile transformation. It delves into the many positive results from the pairing experiment, as well as some of the negatives that were encountered, and weighs whether developers think pair programming is a worthwhile endeavor.

Software developer Laurent Bossavit delivered the second keynote presentation, about why we need to think more critically about software development. He began his presentation by saying his intention was to make you question what you know—or what you think you know.

Interviews

In this interview, Rob Sabourin talks about his STAREAST presentations. These cover how to elicit effective usability requirements with storyboarding and task analysis, and how to blend the requirements, design, and test cycles into a tight feedback loop.

In this interview, Richard Hundhausen talks about real-world software testing, his experience at STAR, the benefits of Scrum and agile, and how we can end the developer/tester dichotomy by bringing these two teams together.

In this interview, software developer Laurent Bossavit talks about why we need to think more critically about software development. He dispels common misconceptions about the industry and suggests better ways to improve the development process, such as agile and lean methods.

In this interview, e-commerce expert Calvin Baldwin tackles the fundamental differences between the agile and waterfall methodologies, why agile is not a software panacea, and whether waterfall will ever see a resurgence or if a new method will evolve to dominate software management.

Better Software Magazine Articles

DevOps can be characterized as the assembly line of building, testing, deploying, and updating enterprise applications. Many software development organizations may claim a comprehensive DevOps strategy, but Chris Riley believes that the only way to be successful is to use a DevOps framework.

Wondering why—with all the jobs you've applied for—you aren't getting noticed? Take it from Xojo CEO Geoff Perlman; it isn't just your programming or testing skills that will land you a job. Far from it. Geoff knows from experience that hiring the right individual is a careful blend of skill, fit, and passion.

It didn't take long for Stacia Viscardi to realize that as effective as agile can be, a plan-driven mindset may not be the best approach for every project or every team. Breaking the rules and embracing whatever it takes to motivate the team to get a project to doneness—and delighting the customer along the way—is a much better approach, even if it means breaking away from fixed iterations.

Conference Presentations

In an industry that continues to rapidly evolve, the pressure to increase our mastery can be overwhelming. Whether browsing the web or your organization's technical library, it's discouraging to realize that many of the skills you’ve mastered are now obsolete, replaced by...

To successfully lead “the nerd herd,” you’re expected to motivate your team to perform, encourage innovation, and produce software solutions that delight the customer. Prioritizing your time for what’s most important can be quite challenging—especially when you’re swamped with a...

As if releasing a quality software project on time were not difficult enough, poor management of planning, people, and process issues can be deadly to a project. Presenting a series of anti-pattern case studies, Ken Whitaker describes the most common deadly habits—along with ways to avoid...

You get paid for doing that? Is it possible to both work and have fun in a large corporate setting? Can joy be made part of the workplace? For the past few years Ryan Kleps and his colleagues have been conducting an informal social experiment using gamification (before they knew it had...